Event details

Kip Thorne, joint winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics, will deliver the Department of Physics’ 43rd Annual Donald R. Hamilton Lecture. His talk, “Exploring the Universe with Gravitational Waves: From the Big Bang to Black Holes and Colliding Stars,” will be held at 8 p.m. Thursday, April 12, in Princeton University's McDonnell Hall, Room A-02. The lecture is free to the public.

Thorne, a 1965 Princeton graduate alumnus and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech, will speak about the two types of waves that propagate through the universe: electromagnetic waves and gravitational waves. He will discuss how prior Princeton physicists’ research served as the foundation for the dawning field of gravitational astronomy, using the LIGO and VIRGO instruments to detect gravitational waves from colliding stars and black holes. Thorne will discuss this exciting work that is opening new windows onto the universe.

Thorne shared the 2017 Nobel Prize with Caltech’s Barry C. Barish, the Ronald and Maxine Linde Professor of Physics, Emeritus, and MIT’s Rainer Weiss, professor of physics, emeritus.

The Hamilton lectures are an endowed series of public talks given in honor of the late Donald Ross Hamilton, an atomic and nuclear experimental physicist who made major contributions to Princeton and the Department of Physics. More information about the Hamilton lectures and the Department of Physics events are available at www.princeton.edu/physics.